Socrates Rhetorical Analysis

The ideas of early philosophers are interconnected and overlapped, resulting in difficulties defining where the beginning of philosophical thought truly lies. The first accounts given of the origins of the world were from the myth-makers, Hesiod and Homer. Their ideas depicting nature as the divine led to the Milesians, who tried to pinpoint the single unity among the multiplicity that is existence. Next came the sophists, teachers of wisdom as persuasion. Finally came Socrates, a character so influential that all the thinkers previously mentioned have been deemed “Pre-Socratics.” Because of the way these thinkers and their ideas evolved, building from one another, similarities between them are inevitable. Socrates’ ideas would not be what

The mythos used as a part of Socrates’ rhetoric in Apology and Meno to articulate the inarticulable was fundamentally different from that of the myth-makers, Hesiod and Homer, because it was used as a form of deception rather than as a basis for rational thought. Hesiod said that the origin of the world was “fundamentally unintelligible and inarticulable,” (Hyland, 38). He uses mythos, or myth, to define the origin of the world because he finds that there is no rational way to put it into words. When he does give the background of the divine in his Theogony, he gives a non-rational explanation of the events that may have occurred to create our world, and the world of the divine. If rationality is a materialistic explanation, myth is non-rational. Socrates, too, finds a use for a non-rational explanation. Though he usually relies on rhetoric with a logical basis to lay his argument before the jury, there is a specific part in Apology where Socrates resorts to myth for the sake of argument. Socrates, unable to articulate why he should not be condemned, produces a myth. He claimed that, “the god seems to me to have set me upon the city as someone of this

After deeper research, I noticed that while Socrates and the sophists both use rhetoric, Socrates uses his rhetoric to persuade people of the truth, while the sophists use their rhetoric solely for the sake of persuasion. Hyland hints at this idea when he explains the sophists’ thought process that “any behavior was equally justifiable as long as one were a sufficiently crafty rhetorician to win his case,” (p. 320). In other words, anyone skilled enough in the art of persuasion would be able to justify any behavior, whether it be good or bad, moral or immoral, even true or false. This idea that persuasion is an art, or the greek techne, implies that persuasion is something that can be taught, something a user can practice and improve. Anyone with enough practice in the art of persuasive rhetoric would not need to know how to reason; instead of wondering whether an idea was true and then explaining the conclusion logically, they could use persuasion to argue for or against anything they wished. As Hyland puts it, “reason becomes indistinguishable from rhetorical skill,” (p. 320). If reason and persuasion are used in the same fashion as the above quote suggests, knowing how to effectively reason becomes trivial. With advanced enough persuasion, someone can argue for or against a behavior and the audience will see their side, no reasoning required. It